Some Profiles in Courage

After a quarter-century of covering figure skating, I am used to hearing ignoramuses put it down for its poofy shirts, sequins and other over-the-top elements. These naysayers are too narrow-minded to see just what extraordinary physical and mental skills are needed to jump and spin and speed across the ice doing intricate footwork on what essentially is a knife’s edge.

Not to mention courage, if we are talking about pairs skating.

Anyone who watched the pairs final Monday would have seen that in abundance when Chinese skater Zhang Dan took a fall that challenged every ounce of connective tissue in her legs.

Zhang was tossed by her partner, Zhang Hao, into a move that required her to spin four times in the air before landing on her right skate. When she could not hold the landing, one of her legs went one way, and the other splayed out 180 degrees, leaving her to slide on her knees into the rink boards.

That happened 38 seconds into a 4-minute 30-second free skate. When Zhang Dan struggled to her feet, limping noticeably, it seemed that would be the end of her Olympics.

Instead, she shook it off and picked up where she had fallen off, fighting to hold the right-footed landing of another throw and going on to win a deserved silver medal. “I am very proud of her for being so brave,” Zhang Hao said.

“Some people think it is just fun, you skate on your feet and hold your partner’s arm, like going to the club,” gold medalist Tatiana Totmianina of Russia said.

“We dress up, we smile, we make hard elements look easy. Everyone thinks, ‘OK, I can do this.’ Pairs is dangerous.”

No one knows it better than she. Totmianina had a horrifying fall from eight feet in the air when her partner, Maxim Marinin, lost his balance while holding her in a lift at a competition 16 months ago.

“They have the courage to do this work, which is very difficult,” said Russian sports psychologist Elena Deryabina, who worked to help Marinin overcome his guilt about the accident. “You must have courage from the beginning.”